


The Price of Progeny

by vinylroad



Category: New Amsterdam
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:30:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinylroad/pseuds/vinylroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John becomes a father for the first time the year he turns ninety-three.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Price of Progeny

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Magic_8ball (Nevermore)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevermore/gifts).



Omar's place is hopping, the furnace burning full blast to keep the mean December chill outside. It's been almost twenty years since he died, but it's never stopped feeling like Omar's bar; there's a framed photo of him beside the art deco mirror John had given him when he first opened the jazz club, back before he had become a father himself. Omar had opened the place because of Hallie, to convince a pregnant Charlene that he was responsible enough to be a real father, borrowed money from John to cover the mortgage those first couple of years, before Omar got the steady, loyal patronage that eventually helped cover the bills. John had only been sober for ten years, long to most, but short to a man who had been an alcoholic for almost one hundred and forty-nine, and he remembers how nervous Omar had been coming to him, like opening a bar was the ultimate betrayal.

It's weird that the only place he's ever really felt at home in the last fifty years is a bar.

John pulls the collar of his jacket up when a lit couple stumble out the front door, leaving it open long enough to let a blast of New York City air, the sharp smell of ozone and the streets. He can barely remember what the city smelled like before, before the cars and the smog, the condensation of people crammed into tall buildings that grow taller and taller into the sky.

Corey slides a tonic water in front of him; he's tending the bar, like most nights, so much like his grandfather it feels almost like Omar never left, the same sage advise, dry humour and warm smile.

"There was a girl," Corey says, wiping down the aged wood of the bar with a ratty rag, "came in asking for John Amsterdam."

He's been John Amsterdam longer than any other identity he's had before, though he's tacked on a "jr." to the end to foil the very few left who could remember him as a cop, old enough now to pass off as his own son. He's stayed in New York for a reason besides nostalgia, the perfect place to get lost in plain sight, recognition reduced to coincidence, the city moving too fast to remember a single face.

But the truth is he's never liked or been good with computers, better with pens and chisels, paintbrushes and parchment paper. The new world isn't friendly to someone without a real birth certificate, social security number or passport. Forgeries are harder to make, more pricey to buy.

"Really?" John asks.

"Yeah. Didn't ask for junior. Just Amsterdam." Corey points toward the back, the poorly lit corner near the storeroom. "She's over there in the booth. Wouldn't really take no for an answer."

He spots her in the last booth, hand curled around a beer bottle. Late twenties, maybe, wearing a t-shirt with _NYU SCHOOL OF MEDICINE_ written across the chest. She's got long blonde hair pulled back into a loose bun, a strong jaw set under pale, freckled skin.

There's something eery about her, a feeling he's had too many time to count over the years. When he looks into the eyes of a shopkeeper with sandy hair and a soft smile, a cabbie with a crooked nose and a familiar voice.

All the lines over the years that he's lost to the world, children and grandchildren he's had to leave behind. He wonders if the businessman he passes on the street is a great-great-great grandchild, if the cashier counting out bills behind bulletproof glass is a descendant of his first child, his thirtieth child, a branch of his family tree that's grown beyond his reach.

Her chin quivers when he sits down across from her and he knows for sure, in that moment, exactly who she is.

"Hi," John says.

She doesn't answer, just shakes her head like he asked her a question, like she can't summon the breath to talk. Her hands are nervous as she slides a photo over to him, her fingers obscuring his face until she lifts them away. It's a photo of him and Sara taken in Central Park, her head resting against his shoulder. Almost twenty-five years old and not faded at all, the colours still as vibrant and perfect as if the photo was taken yesterday, his face completely unchanged.

"Jesus," she whispers quietly. He can hear it like a gunshot though, loud and sharp over the dull sounds of the chatting patrons of the bar.

She regains her composure, takes a deep breath before turning back toward him.

"Do you know who I am?" she asks.

"Yes."

  
**

  
John becomes a father for the first time the year he turns ninety-three.

A son named Isiah. Ten perfectly pink toes and ten perfectly pink fingers scrawling through the air as he wails for his mother, mouth curved into an angry circle.

He feels unwound, out of control, fearful for the first time in almost sixty years. Young again, like the reflection in the glass isn't hiding the years he can feel inside his bones, blood that feels like dust, but still spills red and thick when he nicks himself shaving. He hasn't felt like a man in decades, unattached to the world in a way he doesn't understand, like he's not living as a part of it, but rather only watching it pass by. Having Isiah is different, like being caught in a sudden riptide; he watches his flesh age in a different way, a part of him moving along in time.

John's forced to move on when Isiah is only sixteen, before he grows into a man, goes to medical school, marries his wife and has John's first grandchildren. Most men don't live beyond sixty; he'd been with his wife for twenty years, his face unchanged while hers grew older, wrinkled and aged by the sun.

Thirty-two years later, he hears about Isiah's death, gossips in a butcher shop chattering about his poor widow, his three now fatherless children.

It hurts in a way nothing else has.

Somehow he knew the death that tied him to the earth was never going to be his own.

Isiah's grandson, Francis, signs the Declaration of Independence.

His first daughter is named Irene. She has light blue eyes and curly blonde hair, a devilish smile that melts the coldest of hearts. She and her younger brother, Charlie, spend most of their day running around the small house, tracking dirt up and down the stairs that Evelyn, their mother, complains about at length over dinner.

He catches them later, Irene chasing her brother up the staircase, snapping at his heels.

"Papa," she squeals when he throws her over his shoulder, her small hand clutching the back of his neck.

He has three sons with Adelaide: Jasper, Silas, and Theodore. He fights alongside Silas and Theodore in the Revolutionary War, Jasper's eyesight too poor for him to enlist.

Only one of the brothers returns home.

John's fourth wife, Margaret, dies in childbirth with their baby, a daughter he names Grace.

The doctor, a round man with a thin, greying beard, reaches out and grips his shoulder firmly, says something about God's plans that John doesn't hear, too busy choking on his own grief. The doctor leaves a bloody handprint behind on John's shirt, red leeching into the white cloth around the collar.

He spends the next ten years drinking, a decade hangover that fades into nothing but a bad dream.

Maggie Grace Forster is born on a crisp autumn day in 1882, the faded banners from the first labour day parade still littering the streets outside. She's a quiet child, an old soul. She loses her husband to the bloody fields of France in World War I and never remarries.

She's the first child that stays with him, the first he tells about the curse. She stays with him as he becomes Dutch, then John York, helps care for Omar when Lily Mae dies.

She passes away in her sleep on a hot summer night in 1954.

Eleven farmers, ten doctors, nine teachers, six lawyers, four stay-at-home mothers, three secretaries, three cabbies, two sailors, two writers. An insurance underwriter. A priest. A childrens' book illustrator. A chef. A detective. A ballroom dancer. An electrician. A ferry boat captain. A bank robber. A congresswoman.

He sees New York City built on the back of his children, of his children's children.

His son, Tucker, eats the biggest steak in New York City in 1952. His picture sits above the cash register on the wall until the steakhouse is demolished in a fire.

Jimi is a wild child, born three days after Woodstock to a woman John dates in the late 60s, a hippie whose tiny Tribeca appartment is covered in posters and photos of Joan Baez. She plays _St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band_ at night for the first year, plugs her record player in by the foot of Jimi's crib; the baby never cries, never fusses, stares up at John with wide, dark eyes.

Jimi looks nothing like John, olive skin and thick black hair, a devilish smile that reminds him of Irene. He ends up joining a band, plays lead guitar.

He dies of a heroin overdose when he's twenty-three.

His daughter, Lydia, disappears on December 24, 2001. She's fourteen, wanders away from her mother at a church service and is never seen again. The police find her coat and small silver cross necklace in a soccer field a few miles away, but they never find her body.

It's the closest John's ever come to falling off the wagon; he buys three bottles of whiskey on New Year's Eve, but ends up pouring them down the sink. He puts his hand through the kitchen wall instead, feeling the bone splinter under his skin, his knuckles shifting painfully.

He never tells anyone - not even Omar - that it's the real reason he became a cop.

  
**

  
The crowds thin out as the night slips darker, bar patrons sluggish with alcohol climbing into cabs to shuffle home to their apartments, sleeping off the booze.

"I didn't believe it the first time she told me," she says, her fingers folded together. They're long and elegant and remind him immediately of Sara's, how she had laughed when he told her she should think about being a pianist. His thirty-third child, a son named Charlie, had been a particularly talented musician, something he had picked up from his mother, an opera singer with raven black hair and a vicious mean streak.

"But you believe it now," John says.

She shakes her head, takes another sip of her beer before she goes back to peeling off the label meticulously. "I don't know."

"Olivia-"

"She was so sick that last year, with the chemotherapy and the drugs. She'd talk in her sleep a lot, see things that weren't really there. But I found all this stuff when I was going through her things after the funeral, the photos and the medical records. That's how I found you." She laughs nervously; "I don't know why I came here. I thought maybe if I met you, I'd understand."

"Understand?"

"Why you never came to see me. Why you never called, sent a card." He feels the anger behind her words for the first time, overshadowed at first by shock and fear.

"I didn't know she was pregnant with you when she left," John says, remembering their last conversation, the look of hurt in Sara's eyes before she climbed into the cab. Then finding her apartment empty a few weeks later, using department connections to track her down as the new attending physician in the emergency department at St. Luke's in San Francisco.

"But you knew after."

"Eventually, yes." He'd found the birth announcement online a year later, Olivia Marie Dillane born on December 21, 2009; it hadn't listed a father, but he had known immediately. "She didn't want me to be a part of your life."

It's always been easier when they've left first, when his wives and lovers grew tired of his face reflecting nothing but their own mortality, robbed him of the guilt of having to leave before people started asking questions, before the excuses wore thin.

He thinks of all the birthdays he's missed over the years. His own lost meaning centuries ago, just another day of the year, but he remembers all of his children's birthdays, takes a moment on the day to remember holding them for the first time, how different each was, the unique weight of their little bodies in his arms, like an anchor holding him steady against the everlasting shift of the world.

"You live long enough, you rack up a lot of regrets," John says. He's long since learned that no parent lives without guilt, without feeling they could have done better by their children. Four hundred years and sixty-six children later, it hasn't gotten easier; his life is unnatural, unyielding to the requirements of fatherhood. "I loved your mother, but I hurt her. I've had to live with my mistakes for a very long time."

Someone turns on the jukebox, Ella Fitzgerald humming through the room. Corey's thick laugh blows through the room as one of the waitresses sweeps up shattered glass from the floor, the victim of a tipsy banker.

"How did this happen?" Olivia finally asks, reaching out to touch the thin skin stretched over his knuckles, the bones underneath that never healed back properly, the only change in four centuries.

"It's a long story," John says. He's told it so many times that it doesn't even feel like his story anymore, just a handed down cautionary tale, a twisted fairy tale. John's never much cared for it anyway, a long tale of his own failures, tempered only by the short respites of happiness that came and went far too quickly. "Tell me about yourself."

  
**

  
They say the worst thing you can ever do is bury your child; John's buried sixty-two children, one hundred and twenty-nine grandchildren, one hundred and ninety-three great-grandchildren, two hundred and twelve great-great-grandchildren, two hundred and fifty great-great-great grandchildren, three hundred and sixteen great-great-great-great grandchildren...

He measures time in loss. He never stops counting and it never gets easier.


End file.
